Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer youth activists and youth empowerment organizations (where adults help youth address community issues) opportunities for civic action. Impression management is critical to youth empowerment organizations’ work online, as they attempt to influence the opinions of their audience. However, there is a dearth of research characterizing online impression management in the context of youth empowerment organizations. To address this research gap, we conducted a qualitative study investigating the use of SNS in a youth empowerment organization. Using Goffman’s dramaturgical model, we characterized how youth tried to hack SNS algorithms, and their desire to better identify their audience. Our findings reveal how youth use SNS to create authentic images and connections with their audience. On the other hand, we discuss adults’ desire to convey a curated organizational image and challenges that arose. We conclude with design implications for tools that support impression management online for youth activists.
more »
« less
Supporting Youth Activists’ Strategic Use of Social Media: A Qualitative Investigation of Design Opportunities
Social Networking Sites (SNS) provide a platform for engaging youth in activism (e.g., by helping mobilize civic action). While youth typically employ casual approaches to online activism (i.e., quick actions, such as broadcast posts to advertise social justice events), more strategic practices (i.e., those that are more creative and informed) can increase the likelihood of successful online campaigns. However, little work has examined how youth activists can be supported to use SNS more strategically. To address this research gap, we conducted interviews with youth activists, exploring how youth made sense of social network visualizations and their perspectives on how such tools could support their activism efforts. Our findings characterize how participants made inferences about followers’ identities based on their hashtag use, and how they used those inferences in outreach decisions. We conclude with design implications for future research in this area.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1815940
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10189136
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on humancomputer interaction
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Artificial intelligence (AI) underpins virtually every experience that we have—from search and social media to generative AI and immersive social virtual reality (SVR). For Generation Z, there is no before AI. As adults, we must humble ourselves to the notion that AI is shaping youths’ world in ways that we don’t understand and we need to listen to them about their lived experiences. We invite researchers from academia and industry to participate in a workshop with youth activists to set the agenda for research into how AI-driven emerging technologies affect youth and how to address these challenges. This reflective workshop will amplify youth voices and empower youth and researchers to set an agenda. As part of the workshop, youth activists will participate in a panel and steer the conversation around the agenda for future research. All will participate in group research agenda setting activities to reflect on their experiences with AI technologies and consider ways to tackle these challenges.more » « less
-
Hansson, Karin ; Cerratto, Teresa ; Bardzell, Shaowen (Ed.)Online activism showcases how available digital tools allow social movements to emerge, scale up, and extend globally by fundamentally enabling new forms of power. This special issue brings together eight research articles that engage with the collaborative efforts embedded in various types of activism by studying features such as the socio-technical systems involved; how the activism is organized; relations between traditional and social media; and the complex network of systems, information, people, values, theories, histories, ideologies, and aesthetics that constitutes such activisms. The articles show the spaces in which this activism materializes, and particularly their situation in several intersecting dimensions including motivation, culture, language, and infrastructure. Together, these articles reflect the methodological breadth required to materialize online activism and the need to develop a more nuanced conceptualization of the media ecologies involved. By mapping out how activism is enabled and constrained by human-computer interfaces, this special issue contributes to open up the black box of online activism.more » « less
-
Abstract Existing end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) email systems, mainly PGP, have long been evaluated in controlled lab settings. While these studies have exposed usability obstacles for the average user and offer design improvements, there exist users with an immediate need for private communication, who must cope with existing software and its limitations. We seek to understand whether individuals motivated by concrete privacy threats, such as those vulnerable to state surveil-lance, can overcome usability issues to adopt complex E2EE tools for long-term use. We surveyed regional activists, as surveillance of social movements is well-documented. Our study group includes individuals from 9 social movement groups in the US who had elected to participate in a workshop on using Thunder-bird+Enigmail for email encryption. These workshops tool place prior to mid-2017, via a partnership with a non-profit which supports social movement groups. Six to 40 months after their PGP email encryption training, more than half of the study participants were continuing to use PGP email encryption despite intervening widespread deployment of simple E2EE messaging apps such as Signal. We study the interplay of usability with social factors such as motivation and the risks that individuals undertake through their activism. We find that while usability is an important factor, it is not enough to explain long term use. For example, we find that riskiness of one’s activism is negatively correlated with long-term PGP use. This study represents the first long-term study, and the first in-the-wild study, of PGP email encryption adoption.more » « less
-
Social service providers play a vital role in the developmental outcomes of underprivileged youth as they transition into adulthood. Educators, mental health professionals, juvenile justice officers, and child welfare caseworkers often have first-hand knowledge of the trials uniquely faced by these vulnerable youth and are charged with mitigating harmful risks, such as mental health challenges, child abuse, drug use, and sex trafficking. Yet, less is known about whether or how social service providers assess and mitigate the online risk experiences of youth under their care. Therefore, as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps program, we conducted interviews with 37 social service providers (SSPs) who work with underprivileged youth to determine what (if any) online risks are most concerning to them given their role in youth protection, how they assess or become aware of these online risk experiences, and whether they see value in the possibility of using artificial intelligence (AI) as a potential solution for online risk detection. Overall, online sexual risks (e.g., sexual grooming and abuse) and cyberbullying were the most salient concern across all social service domains, especially when these experiences crossed the boundary between the digital and the physical worlds. Yet, SSPs had to rely heavily on youth self-reports to know whether and when online risks occurred, which required building a trusting relationship with youth; otherwise, SSPs became aware only after a formal investigation had been launched. Therefore, most SSPs found value in the potential for using AI as an early detection system and to monitor youth, but they were concerned that such a solution would not be feasible due to a lack of resources to adequately respond to online incidences, access to the necessary digital trace data (e.g., social media), context, and concerns about violating the trust relationships they built with youth. Thus, such automated risk detection systems should be designed and deployed with caution, as their implementation could cause youth to mistrust adults, thereby limiting the receipt of necessary guidance and support. We add to the bodies of research on adolescent online safety and the benefits and challenges of leveraging algorithmic systems in the public sector.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
